Brendol Hux is a human officer who served the Republic as a junior officer, the Empire as commandant of the Arkanis Academy, and the First Order as a general. He is named in Jason Fry's young-reader novel The Secret Academy (2015) and given his full history in Delilah S. Dawson's Phasma (Del Rey, 2017).
The doctrine
His lasting contribution is an idea: that stormtroopers should be taken as infants and raised to the role, producing soldiers with no prior loyalty to unlearn. The Empire never fully adopted it. The First Order built itself on it, which is why Finn exists, and why the sequel trilogy's central defection is a direct consequence of one man's training theory.
Escape and exile
After Endor he is extracted with the help of the bounty hunter Mercurial Swift, joins Fleet Admiral Gallius Rax's Shadow Council, and flees into the Unknown Regions aboard the Imperialis — one of the founding acts of the organisation that becomes the First Order. On Parnassos he recruits Phasma.
The son, and the end
He fathered an illegitimate son, Armitage, and treated him with open contempt. Around 30 ABY the two people he elevated furthest — Phasma and Armitage — conspire to poison him with a Parnassos beetle toxin. He dies slowly and his remains dissolve in a bacta tank, the death recorded officially as a classified mission. It is the neatest possible summary of what he built: an institution that produces people who will do anything, aimed at the man who taught them to.
